Report: Twitter sees 7,000 Apple tweets per minute during iPad announcement

If you noticed some slowness to Twitter yesterday, it seems it was because the popular microblogging service was another big winner in the Apple iPad announcement yesterday.

Retrevo, a company monitoring prices in the electronics marketplace, has added a new feather to its cap in trying to measure the popularity of an event on Twitter as it happens.  According to its research, at the height of the iPad craziness yesterday, Twitter was seeing 7,400 TPM (tweets per minute) on the subject, this coincided around the time in the address where the hardware specifications were described.

As this is a new service, Retrevo has no historical data to compare this to, but Jennifer L. Jacobson, Director of Public Relations for Retrevo, said, “Whenever something big happens these days, whether it’s an earthquake, a celebrity scandal, or a popular event, Twitter is where people talk about it.”  She went on to add, ” Retrevo will be tracking tech-related launches, events, and more as they happen, so we’re very excited to see future statistics and compare and contrast upcoming events.”

Considering the recent analysis that pointed to how many unused accounts are on Twitter, and how few Tweets the active ones send, this must have been a significant boost for the company.

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